A shoe hung from the gutter. Caught by its white laces, the shoe didn’t move. It was like a rabbit held by the ears.

The woman didn’t know how it got onto the roof of her house. It hadn’t been there yesterday. She was sure of it. It certainly wasn’t her shoe, for she would never be so careless.

She dragged a ladder across the lawn. Torn grass marked her passage. It took her four tries to haul the ladder into place alongside the house. Checking that it was firmly set into the dirt, twice, she began to climb. As she moved further away from the ground, her progress slowed.

She refused to look down.

Halfway up, her palms began to sweat. She gripped the bars tighter and left fingerprints each time she let one go for another. The metal was cold.

She urged herself forward.

The woman was nearly at the top when a gust of wind pushed against her side. She huddled closer to the ladder, wrapping her arms around it. Above her, the shoe looked flustered.

Finally, she gripped the last rung, and she pulled herself up to peer over the gutter onto the roof beyond. A boy lay sprawled by the peak. His eyes were closed.

The woman was flabbergasted. “Hey! Boy!”

He raised his head, squinting lazily at her.

“What are you doing on my roof?” she asked.

“I’m waiting for the universe to spill its secrets,” he said.

“On my roof?”

“Your house is the tallest on the street,” he said. “I figure if I’m going to catch any of the drippings, I need to be as close to the sky as I can get.”

The woman looked closer at the boy. He was still a ways from acne and awkward interactions, with gangly limbs waiting to be grown into. Meeting his gaze, she noticed that his eyes hinted at years they should not yet possess.

She looked away.

Then she noticed he wore only one shoe. “You’ve lost a shoe in my gutter.”

“I didn’t lose it,” he said.

She looked from the boy to the dangling shoe and back.

“It’s there as my anchor,” he told her.

“Right,” she said. “I think that’s enough of your games. It’s time for you to get off my roof.”

“But I can’t leave now!”

“You must, and you will,” she said.

“But the universe is rippling. It’s ready to spill at any moment!”

The woman frowned.

“I can’t leave yet. Not yet,” he said. “Don’t you want to know what it has to say?”

“No.”

“But it would change everything!”

“I don’t care. Get off my roof right now!” The woman pushed herself higher, hoping to make the boy think she’d fetch him if necessary.

“You don’t care?” he asked.

“No. I don’t. Because all that you’re saying is foolish nonsense,” she said.

“It’s only foolish if you’re not listening to it in the right way.”

“Listen, boy. I’ve had enough. You’re going to get down, and then you’re going to come with me,” she said. “We’re going to talk to your parents.”

He had been in a hell of a fight
like being kicked twenty times in the head.
Of course, he would know,
like that time coming out of Driscoll’s,
fighting those three guys from the flats,
the tall one saying,This stupid shit won’t stay down.But they just didn’t get it.
No one ever put him down.

In our garage, the heavy bag swung,
the weight of some dead reputation.
It happens sometimes to boys,
the ones brought up on myths,
on the souls of men always told
to take the first shot.
In our world,
there was no such thing as a sucker punch.

Home now, after five days in the hospital,
after ten hours of surgery,
my brother, sober for years,
his neck carved out like a tree through wires,
turns to me, dips low, feints to the right,
and hisses—Tumors are some nasty shit man—then comes up fast with a hook to my body.Gotcha!

Here are some Auto-suggested Smart Phone Poems, which are written using the Notes app available in most smart phones. To create these kinds of poems, open the Notes app and proceed to “add a note.” The text editor that pops up not only offers a keyboard but also auto-suggests three words. Choose one of those words and another three are suggested, choose one of those, and another three, etc, so that you could write a whole note, or poem in this case, using only the auto-suggested words. The words the app suggests are often words that have been typed into the phone on other occasions, so they are chosen based on the language tendencies of the phone user. The poems are written using only the auto-suggested words. In the examples below, all line breaks have been preserved as they appeared in the Note.

(Note: Maya Williams-Russell, a nine year old from Greenfield, discovered and began writing auto-suggested poems while bored driving in the back of her parents’ car.)

Hey Man Who Is Not A Problem

Hey man who is not a problem, It is a very
long time ago and I am going through the
years to get to know about you. If you have
any questions you might want to go back. It
is a great time.

Maya Williams-Russell

Thanks For Sharing Your Thoughts

The door will have to be able to make a
profit of my favorite songs from the airport.
Check out the window. Please contact me at
all levels of my life. Be my friend. I’m not a
problem . I am going through a series of
sadness.

Maya Williams-Russell

So What’s The Difference

So what’s the difference between a
man and a dog? I think I may have to
be happy. You are not going to have
to do with procedures. I’m sure
there will be other sessions and the
possibility of a global community.
And please don’t hesitate to ask for a
few days to get in contact with you.
Anyways to get a copy of your
classes, or if you need help, I am
required to raise the bar for you
guys. We are not in a kitchen.
Beginning with a modified plunger.

On a warm, slightly overcast Tuesday morning at the end of November, I go to the Haymarket Café in Northampton to meet with local writer Sally Bellerose. She’s the author of the acclaimed 2011 novel The Girl’s Club and numerous short stories, mostly involving themes of gender, class, religion, and illness, among other things.

The café, which is deceptively large compared to its tiny and easy-to-miss entryway, is slow. A few silent, solitary customers populate the narrow top floor, immersed in work. The classic soul singer Sam Cooke plays over the speakers, occasionally interrupted by the high pitch of the espresso maker. While I’m waiting, an elderly couple sits down behind me and grumbles for a minute or two about the grand jury decision in the Darren Wilson case. They go silent once, I presume, their coffee has cooled down enough to drink it. Opened over 20 years ago, The Haymarket has become a something like a symbol of the community. At least one of Bellerose’s characters, having struggled to make a living in Chicopee, seems to think it would be an unrealistic expectation to ever own a house in Northampton. But nonetheless, the author does now lives here.

The Girl’s Club is a realistic but fictional novel set in Chicopee, MA. It vividly depicts the real pressures felt by young American women, especially poor, gender-nonconforming women, as they grow up, look for jobs, navigate religion, and are pressured into starting families. Beginning in high school, it stars Cora Rose, a young woman born to a Catholic family. She also has a painful and debilitating bowel condition, [spoilers ahead] for which she eventually has to undergo a complex surgical procedure. But well before that, she accidentally gets pregnant and marries her future child’s father, somebody she doesn’t really love, long before she ever envisioned getting married. To complicate matters, she’s not sure she’s interested in guys at all, having had a brief but intense, intimate encounter with a female, childhood friend. As she grows older and takes nursing classes while juggling work and parenting, the local lesbian bar The Girl’s Club and its charismatic cast of regulars begins to hold a certain allure for her, much as she is reluctant to admit it. Along the way, she’s alternatively supported by and argues with her two, very different sisters, Marie and Renee [end spoilers].

At about five minutes past our meeting time, I get a call from Ms. Bellerose on my cell phone. Apparently, we’ve been sitting at opposite ends of the room waiting for each other. At the same time, we both say we’ll head over to the other’s table, and end up sitting back down at our own tables to wait. Thirty seconds later, we’ve managed to sort things out, choosing to sit further away from the noisy espresso maker.

How much of The Girl’s Club is based on real experiences?

That is the number one question I get asked. I always say something sarcastic like 11.2%. If we’re talking broad strokes, much of it is based on my life. I had a brother who’s not represented in the book. I was not pregnant when I got married. But I was married to a man, we did have some arguments, ha, but the man the protagonists marries in the novel is very different from the man I married and the situations the characters find themselves in are fictional. I am queer, I did lose my colon. And so the bones of the story, if not the specifics, are based in fact.And The Girl’s Club?

The Girl’s Club was a real bar.So it’s not open anymore?

No, I went with a friend to look for it about five years ago. Some of the people hanging around told us that it’s been gone for maybe five years. I had gone to the Girls Club, maybe fifteen years ago, and it was still there in the back of a nondescript building in Chicopee.

Someone told me it was on a list of lesbian bars with the best names.

Yeah, it’s a great name.

The bartender Darlene wasn’t real was she? I thought she seemed like a real, sort of local personality.

No, she was based on somebody real. But characters take on their own lives and personalities once you start writing and put them in a story. It’s all fiction. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Did you really work as a nurse?

Yeah. I was a nurse for 26 years.

Were you writing during that time?

I was. I used to stick a pad under the Kardex and scribble stuff. Because nurses have so much free time. She laughs ironically.

Were you publishing at that point?

I was publishing in small presses. My first publication was in 1991. I edited a small press called Oregeny Press with Susan Stinson and Janet Aalfs.

Did you find it hard to balance writing and work?

Oh no, I didn’t [balance]. I worked my buns off. I had my son. The protagonist in The Girls Club also has a son, so that is another part of the book that somewhat parallels my life. But I didn’t balance writing and work, I wrote when I could steal a moment. I had no balance. It was all work, work.

Were you always writing about themes of feminism and gender? [Or] Addressing those themes?

Yeah, addressing those themes and other themes, as well. I have a half-written novel based on my job as a nurse working at Monson Developmental Center in Palmer, Massachusetts. That novel deals with race and disability. That institution has closed. I write a lot stories based on what I see and live in everyday life, short stories inspired by family and friends , stories about stories that other people tell me, or, sometimes just wild imaginings that come from who knows where?. But usually there’s an underlying theme. You write about your belief system, or anyway, I seem to .

You know it’s an interesting question because I don’t typically go to church, not that I wouldn’t. I think “Catholic” means both the religious aspect and the cultural aspect. “Practicing Catholic” always makes me laugh. Makes me smile. I was raised to be a Catholic. When I was formed, that’s what was given to me and taught to me. So, culturally, I’ll always be Catholic or, at least, always have been raised Catholic. I’ve been published in Catholic magazines. I apparently have that aesthetic. I recently had a story accepted to Dappled Things” a Catholic literary magazine. They were looking for stories that exemplified grace. I remembered grace as a glimpse of something divine, love or clemency from the harshness of life, those times when you feel transcendence coming from somewhere outside yourself. I think Catholic teaching would call the somewhere outside yourself God. Some people know I’m Catholic even when I don’t mention it.

Do you find it difficult to balance traditional Catholic beliefs [with your life]?

My god, yes. You know you have to like this new pope. He’s way ahead of his predecessors, but he has miles to go.

A lot of The Girl’s Club depicts Western Mass, which today has this sort of reputation for being very queer-friendly, at least the Valley does…

Yeah, right, the Valley does.

Do you think that’s a newer thing?

When I was growing up, I thought Northampton was much more liberal than Holyoke where I was born. When it was time, decades ago at least, to vote on domestic partnership, this was, of course before marriage equality, Chicopee and Palmer voted in Civil Unions before Northampton did. In Western Mass, at least for many of the people I know, there has always been a Yankee sensibility that says yes there are weirdoes, there are queers and we don’t necessarily have to like them, but, this individual freedom trumps that dislike, not in a not in a liberal way, more in a belief thatpeople had the right to be left alone.

So you said you were born in Holyoke, but did you grow up in Chicopee?

Yes.

One of the things that TGC depicted was young adults struggling to enter the workforce, [while also] coming out. Do you think young people today have similar or different challenges?

Every generation thinks the younger generation is better off and worse off. Financially, certainly as far as working class kids trying to get an education goes, this generation is worse off . When I went to nursing school it was about 250 bucks a semester and tuition was paid. There were all kinds of grants and scholarships. There were hoops to jump through, but if you could pass the test and move your case forward, school was paid for. That’s how I became a nurse. Even my books were paid. I don’t think you find that now.

I think I read somewhere that textbooks are 800% more expensive now.

Yeah, it’s insane.

So you just had a story accepted to “Saints and Sinners” I believe?

Yes, I won the Saints and Sinners Fiction Award and they published my story titled Corset.

So now it’s included in a collection?

Yes, and I got a trip to New Orleans. I love New Orleans. Oh my god, go to New Orleans. Sex, religion, Catholicism and Voodoo, class, race, a city alive with it all, struggling and surviving. Lots of grace in New Orleans.

So that’s out now?

Yes. It’s an anthology of fiction titled Saints and Sinners.

Is there like a theme for that anthology?

It’s LGBTQAI however many letters we use now. I like the term queer – inclusive without being cumbersome. “Saints and Sinners” is broadly the theme.

So you’re working on a novel?

I am.

What’s that about?

I have my little sentence about it. It’s called Fishwives. It’s about old women behaving badly. I’m working with themes of class and aging. The main characters, two women who are a couple for sixty years , are in their 90s by the last chapter. They meet in ‘56. So that’s really fun, I was born in ‘51 so I don’t remember ‘56. They meet in their twenties. The first few chapters introduce the characters as young women, but the book, as a whole deals mostly with the women when they are elderly.

So is that going to be a longer book?

I think so.

Sounds interesting. I love stories that take place over lifetimes, or even generations.

They say “write what you want to read.”

What draws you to that theme?

Getting old. Age heightens the whole class thing, particularly if you don’t have enough money. Luckily, I’m fine financially, but see some of my older friends struggling. It’s hard to poor when you’re young, and may be harder to be poor when you’re old. It’s just interesting to just be here at sixty-three and remember how things were and how they could be. Aging is very strange.

What authors do you like to read? Were there any that were influential, formative, or inspiring?

Well Joan Nestle, a lot of her early class/lesbian stuff was a revelation to me. Susan Stinson is a good friend of mine and I love her work. I love Toni Morrison and Denis Johnson and Marilynn Robinson. And of course Flannery O’Conner.

Any advice for young aspiring writers trying to find their place in the world?

Yeah. Send stuff out. When it comes back rejected, look at it, maybe rework it and send it out again.

My mother is an escort and an adult-actress, not a prostitute, call girl, hooker, whore, porn star, or streetwalker. Yes, she has a website and no, you can’t have the address.

An escort doesn’t trade money for sex. She makes her living exercising the cliché “time is money.” One hour, $500. You’ve got to get in touch with her through her website or from a referral. You can’t call an agency or drive real slow by her on the right street. She’s an entrepreneur, complete with an appointment book and a client list. Her price is non-negotiable, you pay for perfection. She’s not on drugs, and she doesn’t have to meet you. She’s not a classless call girl or a filthy prostitute. See the difference? It’s there, most of the time.

Perfect moms don’t exist. Now that I’m thinking about motherhood, I realize that it’s not “I hope I don’t screw up my kids,” but “I wonder what my kids will have to go to therapy for?”

Being fat and an adolescent girl at the same time was hard until I found out that my mom was an escort. My friends and I would sit on my bed after school and read magazines. We’d read about the ways to pleasure a man and how to dress for your body type. I had to look at the “apple shape” section. We all knew the hourglass shape was the best to have. The best way to dress for your shape was to trick men into thinking that you had an hourglass shape by directing attention to your boobs and butt while distracting from your waist. By the time you were undressed, he’d be so excited by the ice cubes you put in your mouth before blowing him that he wouldn’t care what you looked like, at least for the next twenty minutes.

But my mother was an apple, and men wanted her. They called her begging to see her for just an hour. They could afford anything, even hourglasses. I threw away the magazines and used ice to cool drinks. I was the crispiest apple.

I remember the guy who told me that I looked just like my mother, staring at me but never making eye contact. I came home too early. I wanted to cut open his scrotum, but I smiled and walked away as he turned to watch. He paid for my new school supplies and clothes.

Jake, the one that pays her rent and my college tuition, quietly leaves envelopes fat with cash on my Mother’s dresser for the privilege of being her boyfriend. He’s nice enough; he waited until I was twenty-one to ask if he could rent me. It could be very profitable, being the child of an escort and adult actress. One of her photographers offered me $600 to take my shirt off and ride a mechanical bull for a crowd on camera. I almost said yes but wrote a bucket list instead: 1) Ride a mechanical bull. Saying no to people offering to pay me $500 an hour has become a reflex. “No” has to be reflexive. “Rent is due”, “I need health insurance”, “It might be interesting.” These responses are slower, less practiced than “No thank you Sir.”

Max was the first person I met who had a poor, black daddy and a rich, white mommy. He lived on a farm down the road and was the only person who wasn’t black or white but black and white. I thought he was sent from heaven or made up in a lab, he had a divine destiny to teach us all that we were just people. We were both defined by who our parents were. Bastard. Oreo. Slut. I hoped that as racism became a four-letter word maybe people would see that I wasn’t just an escorts’ daughter; I was a women, a unique apple, alive.

My mom hates her job. Maybe that’s why we’re both rich and poor, not in between but both. She always works just enough but not more. She loses friends when they find out; she lies to protect my grandma. Grandma knows, she knows we know she knows, we don’t talk about it. When pressed, my mother says she is in “advertising” and changes the subject. A good escort knows how to manipulate any situation. She would make a good politician.

The neighbors notice the expensive cars parked outside our cozy two-bedroom attic apartment. They watch the men come out alone, negotiate the cracked sidewalk and stay in sixty-minute increments. A fog of sex hangs outside the door; you can smell it for miles. The neighbors grow pot and trade it for the essentials. They don’t talk about what they see to my mother because she is too proud, but they ask me questions when they think my guard is down. My lies are impenetrable, but I wish they wouldn’t ask me things they already know. They accept it because we’re good neighbors but I have to come over to their house to play, their children aren’t allowed in mine.

At nineteen I tried to be gay, but I wasn’t. Then I tried to be asexual. Men were giving, and I took. I loved what they gave me, the attention, the privilege, the things. I loved feeling the unique shape of their cocks for the first time. I felt richer with each new fuck.

My mother says she’s an international model and a sex therapist. She’s kept marriages alive. She always says, “Men need to cheat, they’re hunters. They need to marry Mother Mary and fuck Mary Magdalene.” She says they do things to her that they would never do to their wives. My boyfriend can’t understand why I want an open relationship. I don’t want him to have to cheat. He squeezes me tight to his chest and tells me that not all men cheat, that I’m all he needs. I’m trying to be both the virgin and the slut. I’m starting to realize that we’re different, my partner and I. He says we’re not our gender, we’re all just people. Maybe in Vermont, but where I come from even heaven-sent-black-and-white-people have gender. It’s inescapable.

Sometimes when the rent is due and there aren’t any groceries in the house, I can feel my resources rotting. This $8.50/ hour job isn’t worth it. I am my mothers’ secretary. When someone asks, “Do you speak Russian?” I know it has nothing to do with Russia. The cops she gives discounts to tell her where and when. It’s more of a struggle to not become an escort than to become one.

I want. I want individually packaged yogurt with fruity flavors and meat that isn’t the Manager’s Special. I want silky, black underthings with triple digit price tags. I want to separate twenties into piles of five like my mother and I used to.

But my mother said she’d kill me. She wouldn’t, she would tell my dad, and he would beat me into applesauce. My future degree will be their proudest achievement. I want it too, now that it might be too late. They sent me to college where it’s always winter, so I’ll never want to take my clothing off. I have to become a doctor, so I can save her from her choices. I have to build a big house with an addition. She sleeps with strangers so I can go to college, so she can stop sleeping with strangers. When I told her I was getting a degree in literature, she started a second job selling used books.